


An angel in a time of need

by The_Buzz



Series: Advent Calendar [6]
Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Demon!Dean era, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, One-sided Cas/Dean - Freeform, Sick Castiel, Unexplained Portal, depressed Cas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 14:43:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5748373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Buzz/pseuds/The_Buzz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During the Demon!Dean months, Cas spends a lot of time in a drafty motel, waiting for a call. That is, until he falls through a mysterious portal and lands in a Soho bookshop. A little kindness from another angel goes a long way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An angel in a time of need

**Author's Note:**

> This story is a sequel to "Crowley, Meet Crowley," but stands alone. 
> 
> This story is from a series of prompts that I filled leading up to the holidays as a present for a friend (hence, the "Advent Calendar" series). The prompt for this story was: Cas and Aziraphale compare notes on their respective Heavens.
> 
> Enjoy!

Cas rested on the creaky hotel bed, watching his phone. It was drafty in the small room, despite his cranking the heater up as high as it would go, and he tugged the blankets tighter around him. His vessel got cold very easily, these days. It came with the exhaustion and constant nagging headache and nausea and pain in his joints and the way his lungs could never seem to get enough air. He stifled a cough and glanced at the phone again. Sam hadn’t called since the…the incident, and he’d long since given up on expecting Dean to call.

He suspected he knew what had happened to his friend. He knew the lore surrounding the Mark, anyway. And Dean’s disappearance _had_ followed Sam’s attempt to summon Crowley to the bunker. And Dean was clearly no longer dead, nor quite himself. But he didn’t want to believe it, and so he waited. Maybe Sam would call, and say he’d found him. Maybe Dean would call.

Or maybe Dean was a demon, and Cas’s borrowed grace would burn out before he ever had to find out. He hadn’t told Sam of his suspicions, yet, but he was beginning to wonder if perhaps he should, just so…someone would know. After the grace burned out, of course.

He’d closed his eyes—just for a moment—and only discovered that he’d fallen asleep when a buzzing noise awoke him. He jolted upright, ignoring the ever-present pounding in his head and the way his breath hitched in his lungs. Buzzing. The phone. Maybe it was Sam. Maybe it was _Dean_.

But the phone wasn’t buzzing. He picked it up and gave it a cursory glance, as if to confirm that it was not, in fact, buzzing, before his eyes slid to the source of the noise.

The floor beyond the foot of his bed was widening into a portal. Quickly, in fact, and what had started out as a low buzz was growing into a churning, rushing noise like a whirlpool full of rocks. Then the portal caught the feet of the bed frame and tugged it downward. In a second, the bed was at a forty-five degree angle, and Cas was tumbling straight down into the portal. He tried to reach out and catch himself, but caught only blankets.

He landed in a jumble on a wood floor and immediately started coughing, burying his face in the crook of him arm while still trying to look around and find out where he’d fallen. The effort brought tears to his eyes, and despite getting his head up enough to discover that he was in a low-ceilinged room surrounded by books, he was startled by a hand on his shoulder and a voice asking, “My dear. Are you all right?”

Cas coughed a couple more times, than twisted to see who had approached him. A short, plump man with curly hair and perfectly manicured hands was leaning over him, an expression of deep concern on his face. The man made a vague motion with one hand, and Cas’s coughing subsided immediately.

“That’s a bit better,” the man said in a chipper voice.

“Where…am I?” Cas rasped. Whatever the man—man? Angel? Something else?—had done, it was still frustratingly hard to draw breath. Each inhale sent daggers of pain through his chest.

“You’re in Soho, London. In my shop.” The man stuck out his hand. “Aziraphale. A pleasure to meet you, I’m sure.”

“I fell through a portal,” Cas said, still a bit dazed. He looked up and saw that the portal was still swirling in the ceiling above him. Aziraphale seemed perfectly aware of this fact, and totally unfazed. “What are you?”

“Oh, just a, a perfectly normal human like yourself,” Aziraphale said breezily, hiding the hand he’d used to heal Cas behind his back a little guiltily.

Cas squinted at him. He supposed, to an observer, he _looked_ human, and at this point the faded grace might be difficult to pick up for any being who wasn’t specifically looking for it. Chances were, Aziraphale—whatever he really was—honestly thought Cas to be a human.

“I’m an angel,” Cas said gruffly, then tried again. “What are you?”

Aziraphale blinked a few times, then glanced down at himself, as if unsure how to proceed. “You’re an angel?” he asked after a moment.

Cas nodded, and started trying to push himself up. He noted, without much embarrassment, that he was wearing nothing but his boxers and ratty blue bathrobe.

“Oh, careful, dear,” Aziraphale said. Soon there were small hands bracing him and guiding him to a plush chair near the corner of the room. “I should think I would know if you were an angel,” Aziraphale added, once Cas was seated. “You don’t mean metaphorically, by any chance, do you? As in, ‘oh, he’s such an angel,’ when really you mean a nice sort of person.”

“I am an angel of the Lord,” Cas said again flatly. He didn’t want to be…wherever he was, when there was a chance that Sam was going to find Dean and call him. Or maybe Dean would call him. He glanced up at the ceiling again. “I have to go back.”

“I’m afraid that may not be possible at the moment, dear,” Aziraphale said. “The last portal, you see, it was only one way, it took a bit of doing to set it two ways again. I’ll, er, get started if you like.” Then he paused, and gave Cas a more thorough look. “You _are_ an angel. I just saw it, the flicker of grace, when you said you had to go back.”

“Yes,” Cas said. Whoever this was (for he had never heard of an angel named Aziraphale) seemed genuinely curious and not likely to harm him for his answers, so he added, “My grace at the moment is…borrowed. It’s burning out.”

He’d expected this explanation to put an end to Aziraphale’s puzzlement, but the little angel’s face only clouded more. “I’m sorry, but what do you mean, you’ve ‘borrowed’ it?”

Cas gave a short sigh. “I took it from another angel.”

“But that’s impossible!” Aziraphale exclaimed.

They looked at each other.

“I assure you, it is very possible,” Cas said.

“You’re not from my Heaven,” Aziraphale realized. “You’re from the other world. Where, where demons don’t have wings. And there’s a king of Hell and no Lucifer.”

“…Yes,” Cas said. It was his turn to be puzzled. “Demons have wings? Lucifer isn’t in the cage?” Then the more pressing question, “You’ve met someone else from my world?”

It was too much to hope for that it might be Dean. But he had disappeared, hadn’t he? Maybe that would explain why he hadn’t contacted Sam or Cas. Perhaps he was simply lost. Here. Perhaps he wasn’t a demon after all. It was a foolish notion but Cas couldn’t help the shreds of hope that arose in his chest at the idea.

“Well, yes,” Aziraphale said, beginning to rummage through a chest of drawers and pulling out the materials for a spell of some kind. “A fellow named Crowley. A demon, I mean. Dropped in a few months ago. We sent him back to the other world and closed the portal, but it just insisted on coming back.” He sighed. “I can’t seem to get rid of it, now. It’s such an eyesore.”

Cas nodded, trying to pretend that his absurd hopes hadn’t just been dashed. “Crowley,” he said.

“Yes, yes, dear,” Aziraphale said. “Nice fellow. Got on nicely with my Crowley, er, my friend, that is. Do you know him?”

“I know Crowley,” Cas ground out.

“He had a lot to say about Hell in your universe,” Aziraphale said. “But I admit, I was more curious about its Heaven. Have you spent much time there?”

Cas nodded distractedly, his mind still on Dean. Whatever had happened to Dean, Crowley _had_ likely been involved. That he’d been here…well, it probably didn’t mean anything. “All angels have,” he answered Aziraphale.

“I see,” Aziraphale said. “Well, most of ours do too, I suppose. I’m what you might call a, er, a ground agent, I think it is. Or a ground troop? I’m not certain. Crowley would know. In any case, I’ve been here since the beginning.” He began sorting through the contents of an elaborate-looking wooden box and setting items—a feather, a few jars of powder, and several candles—aside.

“Why?” Cas asked.

“Why, to thwart evil, of course!” Aziraphale sounded mildly affronted, before admitting, “though these days we mostly work together to get it all done. Have you no angels on Earth?”

Cas sighed slightly. “Michael used to send angels to Earth when it was warranted. Once Michael was…out of commission, some angels came to Earth on their own, others when the need arose. But last year…all the angels fell. There are none in Heaven.”

Aziraphale gave a gasp that might’ve been comical if it hadn’t sounded so very concerned. “All of the angels _fell_? They all became demons? Oh, oh my.”

“We didn’t become demons,” Cas said, confused. “Why would we be demons?”

“Because you all fell!” Aziraphale said, waving his hands emphatically.

“…We fell to Earth,” Cas said.

Aziraphale’s expression of horror melted away into one of confusion. “But a fallen angel is a demon.”

“Not where I come from,” Cas said. “Fallen angels are simply…locked out of Heaven. Cut off.” He coughed a little and tugged his bathrobe tighter.

“Indeed,” Aziraphale said, a little skeptically, as he began setting the candles around in a circle lighting each one. “Here, you know, an angel can fall like that” he paused in his candle-lighting to snap his fingers. “Even a good one. All it takes is…hanging about with the wrong people, as it were.”

“A good man can become a demon,” Cas said sadly.

For a few seconds they were silent, both lost in thought.

“It’s really not all that bad, though,” Aziraphale said after a moment. “Crowley’s been a demon for millennia, now, and we still get along very well. We’re good friends, really. We’ve even got a date at the Ritz tonight, and a good bottle of wine. Well, not a date, exactly. Dinner. Crowley has been trying to remind me that you’re not supposed to call it a date, unless you’re, well, ‘together’ as they say. I do find it all hard to keep straight.”

Cas thought about Dean, who was in all likelihood a demon created by the manipulative scheming of their own Crowley, and couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t exceedingly bitter. He imagined sitting across the table from a black-eyed Dean, wine in their glasses, smiling at each other, but the image fluttered away before he could fully realize it. But then, he had never done that with a human Dean, either. And now, some twisted part of his mind insisted on reminding him, he would probably never have the chance. He tried to imagine a different scene, driving in the Impala, as Dean’s eyes flashed black. A new image swam before him, but it was of a black-eyed Dean laughing, at him, as he thrust the angel blade in. He shook his head slightly to avail himself of the thoughts.

Aziraphale continued puttering, laying out lines of blue and red powders in the form of some sort of sigil beneath the swirling portal, oblivious to Cas’s pain. “All the angels fallen. I couldn’t imagine it, really. Do they like the world? Now that they’re in it, that is.”

Cas shook himself slightly. It wouldn’t do to spill his fears to this strange angel. “Some do,” he said. “Others would do anything to return to Heaven, I imagine.” He glanced down at his bathrobe. “I…haven’t gotten out much, lately.”

“You said you needed to return urgently,” Aziraphale asked softly. “If you don’t mind my asking…why?”

“It’s a long story,” Cas said. He stifled a cough rumbling its way up through his lungs, and paused to wait it out. “A friend of mine is, well, missing. I have to be there. In case. He might turn up. I have a cell phone.”

It occurred to him that that hadn’t been the best explanation he could have given, but he felt tired and sick and the horrible thought of Dean as a demon—when _this_ angel had a demon who had remained his friend—was too close to the surface.

Aziraphale placed the feather in the center of the sigil he’d drawn. The portal made a sucking noise, then started spinning in the opposite direction.

“Well, in that case,” Aziraphale said softy. “I suppose it’s best you go. If my friend were missing, well…” he gave a small smile. “I’d want to be there too. Just in case.”

He rested a hand on Cas’s arm, and the nagging desire to cough receded again. Cas stood, pulling his bathrobe around himself and tying it. The room swam slightly, but he felt better than he had in weeks.

“Thank you,” Cas said.

Aziraphale’s smile faded slightly. “There’s nothing to thank me for. I hope you find your friend.”

Cas nodded, pulling over a chair so that it was beneath the portal. If he stood on it, he thought, he would be able to jump through without too much difficulty. “Thank you,” he said again. “I hope you…enjoy your dinner with yours.”

The portal spat him out on his floor and disappeared, leaving him in a tangle of limbs on the study carpet of the motel. Cas pushed himself up slowly, trying not to think about how the room seemed even colder and lonelier than it had been before he’d visited the cozy bookshop.

His phone was still on the table. Sam hadn’t called. Neither, of course, had Dean.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and dropped his aching head into his hands. It probably wouldn’t have mattered, that insidiously realistic part of his mind told him, whether he’d stayed in the other universe for another hour, or another day, or another week. And it had been nice to have the company of another angel, if only for a little while.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to take a break from…all of this waiting. From lying around and doing nothing but watching his phone and feeling his borrowed grace slowly desert him. If only he had somewhere else to go.

Suddenly, there was a very real knock on his door. He stood up, too surprised and interested to even remember to re-tie his bathrobe. Maybe it was Sam, or Dean. Maybe Dean was back and he hadn’t called Cas because he wanted to see him in person. That was the sort of thing Dean might do, after all. He opened the door.

“Hannah.”

Or maybe, he thought, fighting the disappointment that climbed into his chest again, maybe the universe had heard him, and sent a distraction in the form of another friendly angel. It was better than nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> I'd love to hear what you think!


End file.
